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Innovation: Smarter phone calls for your smart phones

By Tom Simonite

Innovation is our regular column that highlights the latest emerging technological ideas and where they may lead.

Two slick new handsets launched last week continue the trend for phones to become ever more powerful and multi-functional computing devices. Gadgets like these could make technological novelties like augmented reality commonplace.

But while hardware manufacturers are finding ever more things for us to do with our phones, their most basic function – to help us receive and manage calls – hasn’t changed much in years. For most of us, call management remains a matter of basic redirection and voicemail services.

Rather than enhancing these core services, network operators have made their calling packages attractive by tying them to coveted gadgets, and in some cases to third-party services such as Twitter and Skype. Now, however, a number of recent developments mean that smarter call management is on its way – though it won’t be the telecom companies that deserve the credit.

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What’s your number?

It will probably come as little surprise that Google, a serial innovator when it comes to communications, is one of the prime movers in this area. Two years ago, it acquired GrandCentral, a company whose service allowed customers to integrate their various telephone numbers and mailboxes into a single, web-accessible account.

The service, now dubbed Google Voice, provides users with a single number that is transferred to different combinations of devices according to who is calling and what time it is. So you might, for example, send a call from a business contact to your work voicemail after office hours, while routing one from a friend to your home line and cellphone, even though both would have dialled the same number.

This is the kind of service that established network operators are in the best position to offer. But they’re currently being left behind by an upstart from a different sector altogether.

Google has recently added features that could yank more control away from the networks, including centralised voicemail, automated voicemail transcription, and caller-specific voicemail. And this week, it was reported that users will be able to take their existing numbers with them to the Google Voice – overcoming one frequent obstacle to new telecom services. There’s no launch date for Google Voice as yet, though, and for the moment, it remains invitation-only.

White spaces

Google Voice sits on top of the existing network infrastructure; you still need to subscribe to a network for calls to reach your cellphone, for example. But a patent filed by Google last year has the potential to shake up the industry much more directly. It envisages that your device would switch to the cheapest provider every time a connection was needed, rather than being tied to a single network.

Although prototype white space devices have been submitted to the Federal Communications Commission for testing, it’s too early to say exactly what they might offer. Nonetheless, they clearly they have the potential to cause major headaches for purveyors of traditional phone connections&colon; by creating a national voice-over-broadband system that could stand entirely apart from the conventional telecom networks, for example.

Bill per byte?

These new possibilities are now starting to emerge because of the shift away from the point-to-point principle of telephony – a concept that hasn’t changed much since it was pioneered by Alexander Graham Bell. Today, we’re moving towards a world where every person has a computer in their pocket that is able to communicate in a variety of ways over a network that also offers multiple ways to make connections.

That undermines the traditional way networks have charged their customers. A UK space scientist last year calculated that the per-byte cost of text messages far exceeds that of data sent from space. That means texting is an expensive business once a quota of free messages runs out – but a smartphone user can send any number of email messages, which are functionally very similar, without additional charges.

Then there’s Skype, now probably the world’s biggest carrier of international voice calls. While some networks remain hostile to Skype, prohibiting its use over their mobile broadband networks, others have embraced it, allowing free Skype calls between handsets. Again, that raises uncomfortable – for the network operators, anyway – questions about the cost of traditional voice calls.

Ultimately, these distinctions are hard to justify in a digital world, full of devices that can readily switch between communications media. They imply that the 1s and 0s which make up a voice call, a Skype call or a webpage are somehow worth different amounts. Perhaps it’s time to address that anomaly and switch to pricing according to the amount of data carried, and to open up to new ideas about carrier-side services that would allow communications gadgets to realise their full potential. Then we would really have smart phones.